The United Caliphate of Great Britain? 99

As old Charles III, newly crowned king of Britain and its Commonwealth, is afflicted with cancer, his reign will not be long. Will he be succeeded by his son William, Prince of Wales? Or is the Christian monarchy doomed to imminent extinction and the United Kingdom destined by its own folly to become a Muslim tyranny? Perhaps a caliphate?

The United Caliphate of Great Britain?

Bruce Bawer writes at FrontPage:

In 1961, there were 50,000 Muslims in all of Britain and a total of seven mosques. Twenty years later, the Islamic population had increased tenfold and the number of mosques had risen by almost 2000%. Today the official tally is closing in on five million. And the number of mosques? It’s well into the four figures.

What kind of impact has this rampant growth had on Britain? Other statistics help paint the picture. Terrorism? Two examples: the 2005 London bombings killed 52 and injured 784; the Manchester Arena bombing killed 22 and injured 512. Grooming gangs? In the town of Rotherham alone (pop. 265,000), the rapes of 1400 English girls by Muslim gangs have been systematically covered up for decades by police, politicians, social workers, and the media. There’s no reason to believe that the situation isn’t just as bad in cities and towns all over England.

Politicians are no longer safe. In 2021, a Conservative Party MP, David Amess, was murdered by a jihadist at a meeting with constituents – and his pusillanimous colleagues collaborated with the media to turn the focus away from the dangers of Islam to the supposed perils of “online abuse”. Just the other day, another conservative MP, Mike Freer, who is gay and who represents a largely Jewish constituency, announced that he would be leaving the House of Commons in the wake of numerous threats from Muslims.

Members of other non-Western immigrant groups – notably Hindus – have done a spectacular job of integrating peacefully and prosperously into British society. But the record of Muslims in Britain, who outnumber Hindus in Britain by almost four to one, has been drastically different. Instead of assimilating, they’ve formed sharia enclaves where their imams preach hatred of the West.

While their daughters wear hijabs symbolizing subordination and their sons terrorize the schools, the parents demand that those schools purge curricula of material that contradicts their religious teachings.

Fifty years ago, West European leaders agreed to “permit Arab countries to export millions of their populations into all the EEC countries [European Economic Community – forerunner to the European Union], along with their culture and their customs”. (See our post Europe Betrayed here for the events and causes – mostly concerning Europe’s need for Arab oil – leading up to the agreement.) Britain, though it had been hesitant at first to accept the terms demanded by the Arabs, fell into line and was party to the deal.

Civil service boffins kindly explained to the British people that the population of their country was sinking and before long there wouldn’t be enough working people to maintain the welfare-state. So without asking the citizens, they began to bring in a stream of Muslim immigrants. The stream has not stopped; it has become a torrent – swelled not only by increasing numbers of Arabs but by Muslims from just about every Islamic country.

What do these immigrants come for? Not to contribute to the maintenance of the welfare state, but to benefit from it; to get free education, free health care, free housing, and unearned cash. Will Muslims who come for the welfare go to work? No. They’d really rather not and anyway why should they?

Meanwhile the ever-growing number of Muslims who live on the dole – and who’ve never so much as contemplated entering the job market – has placed an ever-growing burden on the British welfare state, necessitating ever more severe cutbacks in other public expenses.

So the purpose of letting them in has not been and will not be realized! Still, British governments will  not be so impolite as to stop them coming.

If they had not come …?  Is a welfare state always a good thing? Does a small population need a welfare state?

Are the Muslim immigrants a boon in any way to their host country?

No. Quite the contrary.

In one city after another, everyday barbarism – machete attacks, acid attacks, and rape statistics that have risen 340% nationwide in the last decade – native Britons feel increasingly unsafe, even as adherents of a faith whose holy book calls for their destruction receive preferential treatment in everything from housing to hiring to higher education.

Hundreds – if not thousands – of native Brits have dared to state the truth about Islam only to be imprisoned for it. And in recent months, as the streets of British cities have filled weekend after weekend with rabid Muslims shouting antisemitic slogans, it has been hard not to imagine them doing to their infidel neighbors what Hamas did to Israelis on October 7. …

For an example of the kind of thinking that, decades ago, set Britain – and the rest of Western Europe – on the road to disaster, consider these passages from an editorial published in a major U.K. periodical: in the West, the editorial warned, “the threat of population collapse” would cause “the welfare state model” to collapse as well, making one thing urgently important above all else – namely, to welcome immigrants in large numbers.

When did this article appear? In 1960? 1970? No. Believe it or not, it appeared in the February 3, 2024, issue of the Spectator (not to be confused with the American Spectator), the flagship publication of the British conservative establishment. Under the headline Who’s Afraid of Population Growth? the Spectator’s editors cited the fast-declining populations of South Korea and Japan as threats to those countries’ economic prospects, and further noted that “in almost every country in Europe the working–age population has already started to decrease”. In Britain, by contrast, “our working-age population is projected to keep rising”.

The Spectator’s editors presented this upward trend as a magnificent accomplishment. Note, however, the failure to distinguish between “working-age population” and working population. Yes, the editors acknowledged that Britain’s years of massive immigration have caused widespread alarm. But they then immediately posed the question: “which is the worse problem to have – too many people or too few?” And they made it clear that for them the answer is undebatable: “too few”.

The real answer, of course, is: it depends. It depends, that is, on which people you’re letting inAre they entering legally – or not? Are they skilled workers and civilized souls in search of better paying work – or are they criminals, freeloaders, barbarians? Do they dream of enjoying the freedom of the West – or are they fierce, unshakable adherents of a religion that’s utterly irreconcilable with Western freedom?

The editors of the Spectator dance around all of these vital questions only to zero in on another. “Newcomers to the UK,” they write, “tend to have larger families, which is the main factor in maintaining our birth rate. Almost a third of all British babies are born to immigrant mothers. In London, it’s closer to 60 per cent. This has not prompted the country to come apart at the seams. Instead, we have created a multi–faith society whose cohesiveness is envied by much of Europe.”

“Multi-faith society”? It’s more accurate to refer to the U.K. as “a society in which Christianity is shriveling [that has been happening for generations – ed.) and virtually every institution has capitulated to Islam.”  [That’s the horror -ed.] “Cohesiveness”? British elites have long since come to understand that when Islam is part of the mix, there’s no cohesiveness except on its own draconian terms. Just look at London, which, as many longtime inhabitants lament, no longer remotely resembles its former self: entire neighborhoods now look like Kabul or Karachi; police arrest critics of Islam but ignore Muslim violence; politicians wink at urban rot while mouthing insipid pieties about “cultural enrichment”; and the mainstream media demonize anyone who dares to speak honestly about what is, in fact, an existential nightmare in the making.

The Spectator editors seem to want their readers to see certain things as being inevitable, set in stone – to see globalism as a fait accompli and revolutionary demographic change as a force of nature. Reading such nonsense, you’d think that there’s no such thing as the possibility of a country – acting upon the wishes of its own people – imposing, and enforcing, sensible immigration controls.

After all, British citizens voted in 2016 to leave the EU so that they might be able to do precisely that. But though the Brexiteers won, both the Tories and Labourites have refused to give them what they wanted on the immigration front. The insane, massive influx has continued – consisting largely of boats packed with young Muslim males who are coming ashore illegally.

And it’s not only on the immigration issue that ordinary voters feel ignored by their major political parties. Largely because of the unending flood of newcomers, young British natives can’t get decent jobs or buy homes, and older folks are denied vitally important medical treatments or are put on long waiting lists for them. Meanwhile illegal immigrants are first in line for many of the goodies.

And the Spectator editors acknowledged absolutely none of this. No, as far as they’re concerned, “[t]he problems arise when more people leave than arrive: a decline in population numbers is what brings crisis”. Full stop. But only a few sentences later the editors conceded that the U.K. does indeed have a crisis – namely, a “welfare crisis”.  Over five million people, they admitted, are collecting “out-of-work benefits during a worker shortage” that’s “drawing in a million migrants a year”. Hmm, food for thought: why are so many people in the U.K. collecting unemployment when there aren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs? Could the explanation be that a great many of the Muslims in Britain have absolutely no interest in finding employment when they can continue to live very well on government handouts? Certainly that’s the case in many other parts of Western Europe. Needless to say, the Spectator editors don’t want to go there.

Approaching their conclusion, the editors offer yet another dishonest touch: “many” of the “current high number of immigrants to the UK,” they maintain, are “highly skilled people who are more likely to work and pay taxes than native Britons”. Ah, the wonderfulness of the word “many”, which can mean ten or a hundred or a few thousand out of, well, a multitude. The editors then slip in a brief-as-possible admission that, yes, “[w]e need to build more homes and manage integration better” – only to add quickly, by way of wrapping up, that “these are issues that arise as a result of the country’s success”.

What to make of this editorial? Think of it this way: it’s just one more proof that while mass immigration has ravaged the lives of many Western Europeans, it has yet to harm the elites who run key institutions like the Spectator – which, I guess, is why they’re able to convince themselves that immigration has actually been a triumph rather than a horror show.

To be sure, drastic population decline is problematic, too. But the kind of population growth that will ultimately transform Britain into a sharia state is something only an Iranian mullah could celebrate. For the editors of the Spectator to cheer this dire development isn’t entirely surprising – plenty of nominally conservative periodicals seem unable to shake the libertarian credo that importing armies of riffraff is always a socioeconomic good – but it’s disappointing, to say the least. Indeed, to read such drivel in the year 2024 is to recognize just how few allies ordinary Western Europeans – people who, with fewer and fewer exceptions, are profoundly alarmed by the course their continent is taking – have among their powerful elites.

Will the powerful elite of Britain welcome living in a caliphate? Will they convert to Islam? Will they submit (which is what “Islam” means)?

Will King Charles III be the last monarch of Britain?

Posted under Arab States, Britain, Europe, Globalism, immigration, Islam, Muslims, Terrorism, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, February 7, 2024

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali Renounces Reason and Embraces Faith 0

It is with strong – undiminished – respect that I now feel compelled to argue with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

She is brilliant, courageous, principled. But she has turned from rationality and atheism, where she found intellectual asylum from the cruel and preposterous religion of Islam, back to superstition in the form of the no-longer-cruel but still preposterous religion of Christianity.

She writes (in part – please read it all) under the title Why I Am Now a Christian:

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

 

 As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

 So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

 

So far, good. No argument. She goes on:

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Leaving aside the question of whether there is something that can be justifiably labeled “the Judeo-Christian tradition” (I do not think there is – for my reasons see here), let’s consider the point she is making.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity. 

I have not read that work by Tom Holland and I am not now arguing with him.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes he is right that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms” – she notes in particular “of the market, of conscience and of the press” — “find their roots in Christianity”. It is with her I am arguing, and reasons to reject that claim leap to my mind. Freedom of the market? Doesn’t Christianity deny that rich men can “enter heaven”? Of conscience? Who can count the number of “heretics” put to death in war, on the rack, at the stake for holding opinions that Christians in power objected to? How many who put those opinions in writing before and after there came to be such a thing as “the press”? Christian persecution of its critics came to an end only with the Enlightenment, the European movement that broke the power of the churches and raised reason over irrational faith.

She writes:

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communitiesIt was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

No, no, no, no, and no. Freedom of conscience and speech came after centuries of no debate with Jewish and Christian “communities”. It came from thinkers of the Age of Reason. Many of whom were atheists, and all of whom were skeptics. “Free thinkers”. The idea that such freedoms ought to be allowed is the product of rational thinking.  The Age of Science was born then. Not when Galileo or Giordano Bruno lived and experienced what the Catholic Church deemed to be a Christian correction – threatened torture and forced confinement for the one, the stake for the other. The Churches’ cruelty diminished because reason and freedom became the mood of a certain time. Superstition was hushed – never suppressed, unfortunately – by reasoned argument, critical examination. Institutions were built to protect freedom despite the dogmatism of the Christian churches – all of them, Catholic and Protestant. Christianity has not “outgrown”, will never “outgrow”, its “dogmatic stage”. “Christ’s teaching” can only be guessed at, and none of the known guesses suggest that it “implied …  a circumscribed role for religion”. Religion was most decidedly not “separate from politics” in the Judea of the first Caesars. As for compassion and humility, Christian sages from St. Paul onward have preached one or both – St. Paul stressed humility – but the history of the religion does not demonstrate the habitual observance of either to any convincing degree.

[A]theism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Atheism does not ask that question. It is not a reasonable question. What could the meaning of life, of existence, possibly be? Why does it need meaning? Whose purpose? If no one made the universe and life there can be no purpose in their existence. Human beings make their own purposes. Only if you already believe in a supernatural Creator can you seek an elusive purpose or meaning in all “creation”.

The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

I would say, if you can believe in a god, you can believe in anything. The god hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny.

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

A nihilistic vacuum? Freedom, reason, science, technology, material abundance, rule of law nihilistic? Free societies, Western civilization a vacuum? Contains no riches, just videos on TikTok? No, its enemies are the vacuum-makers. Sure, abundance will include silly things; freedom is messy, but you have choice. It is true that a great many people only discover how good their Western way of life was when they  have lost it. Nice that their ignorance gets cured, sad that their loss may be irrecoverable.

Woo Muslims away from their superstition by offering them another superstition named Christianity? Convert all the world to Christianity, which “has it all”, and the world will be again as Europe was between the fall of Rome and the rise of Reason? As good? Rather, as dark. As cruel. An erosion of our civilization more certain, more absolute, arguably even more tragic than the horrors she names  that threaten us now: “… the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”

Her diagnosis of what ails our civilization is right enough. Her prescription for curing it is a mistake. Christianity has not been a force for good in history. And what is Christian belief? That a Jewish man who lived in a province of the Roman empire during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius was the Creator of the universe! (John 1:9,10. That [Jesus] was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.) How can that be easy, how can it be possible, for an intelligent thinker of our enlightened age to accept? Or the rest of the tale: that he was born of a virgin, performed miracles, came alive again three days after he’d died, and ascended bodily to a material heaven?

And what of Christianity’s moral message? “Resist  not evil” is not helpful advice for us in our present predicament. What of the reason ascribed to his sojourn on earth as a man – to suffer and die for the salvation of mankind? How he came to die an agonizing death by crucifixion – the Roman method of legal execution for crazy daredevils convicted of organizing or attempting insurgency – has a muddled background story and incompatible Christian  explanations. According to the believers, the Jews found him guilty of breaking some suddenly found and quickly forgotten law of their religion and insisted that the Romans execute him. The obliging Romans reluctantly acceded to their demand, so it is the Jews who are cursed forever as deicides. But also that he was born in order to be tortured to death, that it was his mission to sacrifice himself as the means to lift from humankind the original sin of Edenic disobedience (to himself);  so he was inevitably doomed to that extremely painful and prolonged form of  suffering – and a death that was not actually death – by his own decree.

O Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if you can believe all that, you have abandoned not only reason but common sense!

There is no formula for “saving”, let alone transfiguring, the human race. Not a proletarian revolution. Not a global coming to Jesus. It is not faith, not divinity,  but doubt – the instrument of vigorous intellectual humility – that promotes and protects tolerance and prosperity; that sustains “human life, freedom and dignity”.

 

Jillian Becker   November 12, 2023

Posted under by Jillian Becker on Monday, November 13, 2023

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali renounces reason and grasps faith 403

It is with strong – undiminished – respect for Ayaan Hirsi Ali that I now feel compelled to argue with her.

She is brilliant, courageous, principled. But she has turned from rationality and atheism, where she found intellectual asylum from the cruel and preposterous religion of Islam, back to superstition in the form of the no-longer-cruel but still preposterous religion of Christianity.

She writes (in part – please read it all) under the title Why I Am Now a Christian:

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

 

 As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

 So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

 

So far, good. No argument. She goes on:

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Leaving aside the question of whether there is something that can be justifiably labeled “the Judeo-Christian tradition” (I do not think there is – for my reasons see here), let’s consider the point she is making.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity. 

I have not read that work by Tom Holland and I am not now arguing with him.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes he is right that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms” – she notes in particular “of the market, of conscience and of the press” — “find their roots in Christianity”. It is with her I am arguing, and reasons to reject that claim leap to my mind. Freedom of the market? Doesn’t Christianity deny that rich men can “enter heaven”? Of conscience? Who can count the number of “heretics” put to death in war, on the rack, at the stake for holding opinions that Christians in power objected to? How many who put those opinions in writing before and after there came to be such a thing as “the press”? Christian persecution of its critics came to an end only with the Enlightenment, the European movement that broke the power of the churches and raised reason over irrational faith.

She writes:

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

No, no, no, no, and no. Freedom of conscience and speech came after centuries of no debate with Jewish and Christian “communities”. It came from thinkers of the Age of Reason. Many of whom were atheists, and all of whom were skeptics. “Free thinkers”. The idea that such freedoms ought to be allowed is the product of rational thinking. The Age of Science was born then. Not when Galileo or Giordano Bruno lived and experienced what the Catholic Church deemed to be a Christian correction – threatened torture and forced confinement for the one, the stake for the other. The Churches’ cruelty diminished because reason and freedom became the mood of a certain time. Superstition was hushed – never suppressed, unfortunately – by reasoned argument, critical examination. Institutions were built to protect freedom despite the dogmatism of the Christian churches – all of them, Catholic and Protestant. Christianity has not “outgrown”, will never “outgrow”, its “dogmatic stage”. “Christ’s teaching” can only be guessed at, and none of the known guesses suggest that it “implied …  a circumscribed role for religion”. Religion was most decidedly not “separate from politics” in the Judea of the first Caesars. As for compassion and humility, Christian sages from St. Paul onward have preached one or both – St. Paul stressed humility – but the history of the religion does not demonstrate the habitual observance of either to any convincing degree.

[A]theism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Atheism does not ask that question. It is not a reasonable question. What could the meaning of life, of existence, possibly be? Why does it need meaning? Whose purpose? If no one made the universe and life there can be no purpose in their existence. Human beings make their own purposes. Only if you already believe in a supernatural Creator can you seek an elusive purpose or meaning in all “creation”.

The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

I would say, if you can believe in a god, you can believe in anything. The god hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny.

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

A nihilistic vacuum? Freedom, reason, science, technology, material abundance, rule of law nihilistic? Free societies, Western civilization a vacuum? Contains no riches, just videos on TikTok? No, its enemies are the vacuum-makers. Sure, abundance will include silly things; freedom is messy, but you have choice. It is true that a great many people only discover how good their Western way of life was when they  have lost it. Nice that their ignorance gets cured, sad that their loss may be irrecoverable.

Woo Muslims away from their superstition by offering them another superstition named Christianity? Convert all the world to Christianity, which “has it all”, and the world will be again as Europe was between the fall of Rome and the rise of Reason? As good? Rather, as dark. As cruel. An erosion of our civilization more certain, more absolute, arguably even more tragic than the horrors she names that threaten us now: “… the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”

Her diagnosis of what ails our civilization is right enough. Her prescription for curing it is a mistake. Christianity has not been a force for good in history. And what is Christian belief? That a Jewish man who lived in a province of the Roman empire during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius was the Creator of the universe! (John 1:9,10. That [Jesus] was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.) How can that be easy, how can it be possible, for an intelligent thinker of our enlightened age to accept? Or the rest of the tale: that he was born of a virgin, performed miracles, came alive again three days after he’d died, and ascended bodily to a material heaven?

And what of Christianity’s moral message? “Resist  not evil” is not helpful advice for us in our present predicament. What of the reason ascribed to his sojourn on earth as a man – to suffer and die for the salvation of mankind? How he came to die an agonizing death by crucifixion – the Roman method of legal execution for crazy daredevils convicted of organizing or attempting insurgency – has a muddled background story and incompatible Christian  explanations. According to the believers, the Jews found him guilty of breaking some suddenly found and quickly forgotten law of their religion and insisted that the Romans execute him. The obliging Romans reluctantly acceded to their demand, so it is the Jews who are cursed forever as deicides. But also that he was born in order to be tortured to death, that it was his mission to sacrifice himself as the means to lift from humankind the original sin of Edenic disobedience (to himself);  so he was inevitably doomed to that extremely painful and prolonged form of  suffering – and a death that was not actually death – by his own decree.

O Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if you can believe all that, you have abandoned not only reason but common sense!

There is no formula for “saving”, let alone transfiguring, the human race. Not a proletarian revolution. Not a global coming to Jesus. It is not faith, not divinity, but doubt – the instrument of vigorous intellectual humility – that promotes and protects tolerance and prosperity; that sustains “human life, freedom and dignity”.

Jillian Becker   November 12, 2023

Update:  Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s husband, Niall Ferguson, has also embraced Christianity.

Posted under Atheism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Religion general by Jillian Becker on Sunday, November 12, 2023

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Omar Kayyam, the great Persian poet and atheist 136

May 18, 2023 was the 975th anniversary of the birth of one of our favorite atheists, the Persian poet, mathematician and scientist, Omar Kayyam (born May 18, 1048).

We are convinced that he was an atheist, though some scholars have found reason in his writings to doubt it.

Simon Maass has examined the arguments for and against Omar Kayyam’s atheism.

He writes at our Forum:

Some of the Islamically dominated world’s greatest cultural and intellectual achievements have been completely unconnected to religion.

Think of Omar Khayyam, the twelfth-century poet and polymath who did so much to advance algebra and conducted an “outstandingly accurate” measurement of the length of a year. Having lived in Khorasan, Bukhara, Samarkand and Isfahan, he was practically an Eastern Erasmus, a historical figure shared by Persia, Turkey and Central Asia.

He was also, as many have speculated based on his poetry, likely an atheist or agnostic. This would only have been appropriate, as Khayyam hailed from Iran, one of the clearest examples of a country that had been, to recycle Atatürk’s phrase, “a great nation even before [it] accepted the religion of Islam.” One analysis that leans relatively heavily towards deeming Khayyam to have been a believer is the entry on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The authors cite the great Persian scholar’s philosophical treatises, in which he defends certain religious ideas, and interpret those verses he wrote which suggest an attitude of scepticism or agnosticism as reflecting merely his emotional experiences of the world around him, rather than what he believed on an intellectual level. This interpretation seems highly dubious, as the same article quotes the following lines from Khayyam’s pen:

“The secrets which my book of love has bred,
Cannot be told for fear of loss of head;
Since none is fit to learn, or cares to know,
‘Tis better all my thoughts remain unsaid.”

Against this backdrop, given the conflict between what Khayyam explicitly wrote on religious matters in his treatises and what he subtly implied in his poems, it seems much likelier that the latter reflects his true convictions, whereas the former was written to protect himself, or simply as an intellectual exercise. Even if Khayyam truly believed all he wrote in the treatises, there is little, if anything, the authors attribute to him which implies a religious belief beyond deism. Meanwhile, the article acknowledges that “Khayyam challenged religious doctrines, alluded to the hypocrisy of the clergy, [and] cast doubt on almost every facet of religious belief.”

Moreover, even these commentators see fit to observe:

“It is noteworthy that Khayyam’s philosophical treatises were written in the Peripatetic tradition at a time when philosophy in general and rationalism in particular were under attack by orthodox Muslim jurists—so much that Khayyam had to defend himself against the charge of ‘being a philosopher.’”

More broadly, the main effect that Mohammad’s creed had on Khayyam was to trip him up and hold him back. The polymath’s powerful patron, Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, was assassinated by a member of a rival Islamic sect, whereupon the mathematical maestro fell out of favor with the royal court. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson write:

“Funding to run the Observatory [where he worked] ceased and Khayyam’s calendar reform was put on hold. Khayyam also came under attack from the orthodox Muslims who felt that Khayyam’s questioning mind did not conform to the faith. He wrote in […] the Rubaiyat [the collection of his quatrains] :

‘Indeed, the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my Credit in Men’s Eye much wrong:
Have drowned my Honour in a shallow cup,
And sold my reputation for a Song.’”

According to various online sources, though I have been unable to locate the source of this claim, Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked “that he would never forgive Christianity for taking [Blaise] Pascal.” The great iconoclast, it seems, was not a little distraught to see such a brilliant mathematician waste his exceptional brainpower on Christian apologetics. To speak similarly of what Islam appears to have done to Khayyam, forcing him to veil his true thoughts and squander time and energy fending off religious attacks, would be entirely justified.

Posted under Atheism, Iran, Islam, Science by Jillian Becker on Friday, June 2, 2023

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Our new alliance with Atheists for Liberty 113

Jillian Becker, editor-in-chief of The Atheist Conservative, has accepted an invitation from Thomas Sheedy, President and Founder of Atheists for Liberty, to join the organization’s Board of Advisors.

Please visit the website of Atheists for Liberty here:

*

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Thomas Sheedy

Posted under Atheism by Jillian Becker on Friday, May 5, 2023

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The disastrous decline of the practice of medicine 115

Can you trust your doctor to be qualified in Medical Science? Or was he awarded his degree because he scored a pass in Diversity Studies?

Beware! The latter is more likely now to be the case.

Medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit …,”  Heather Mac Donald writes in an authoritative and important article at City Journal which we quote in part.

Why are they doing that?

… in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.”

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. … Physicians must “confront inequities and dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression, as well as embed racial justice and advance equity within and across all aspects of health systems”. The country needs to pivot “from euphemisms to explicit conversations about power, racism, gender and class oppression, forms of discrimination and exclusion”.  (The reader may puzzle over how much more “explicit” current “conversations” about racism can be.)

In other words, the policy-makers of the profession, being convinced that Blacks are innately less  intelligent than Whites and Asians, are lowering standards and introducing new criteria of evaluation by requiring skills in hitherto unrelated subjects (such as “communication and interpersonal skills”), in order to have more black doctors. Their motive is impeccably virtuous. Blacks must be saved from feeling inferior.

(It doesn’t apparently strike them that by lowering standards to achieve this aim they are declaring their firm belief that Blacks are inferior.)

Of course they never say they think Blacks are less brainy than Whites and Asians. They claim that the reason Blacks generally score lower in exams is because they are subjected to race prejudice and discrimination.* They are therefore less healthy, and therefore less able to study.

In accordance with the idea that racism causes racial health disparities, they are changing the direction of medical research, the composition of medical faculty, the curriculum of medical schools, the criteria for hiring researchers and for publishing research, and the standards for assessing professional excellence. They are substituting training in political advocacy for training in basic science. They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of antiracism lecturers.

If this is not done, the medical school’s existence may be terminated:

Faculty are responsible for teaching how to engage with “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” in order to “disrupt oppressive practices”. Failure to comply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk and lead to a school’s closure.

These exotic ideological obligations cannot be shrugged off by the trained doctor once he has his degree and starts practicing his profession:

According to the AAMC, newly minted doctors must display “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice”.

Research will be well funded – provided it is spent  on advancing the ideological doctrine:

They have shifted billions of dollars from the investigation of pathophysiology to the production of tracts on microaggressions.

Funding that once went to scientific research is now being redirected to diversity cultivation. The NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity.

Which means that “white privilege” and “cisheteronormativity” (translation: being of European extraction and sexually normal) are worse afflictions than Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma.

Private research support is following the same trajectory. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute [HHMI] is one of the world’s largest philanthropic funders of basic science and arguably the most prestigious. Airline entrepreneur Howard Hughes created the institute in 1953 to probe into the “genesis of life itself”. Now diversity in medical research is at the top of HHMI’s concerns. In May 2022, it announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a “happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist” in the words of the institute’s vice president. “Experts” in diversity and inclusion will assess early-career academic scientists based on their plans for running “happy and diverse” labs. Those applicants with the most persuasive “happy lab” plans could receive one of the new Freeman Hrabowski scholarships. The scholarships would cover the recipient’s university salary for ten years and would bring the equivalent of two or three NIH grants a year into his academic department. If an applicant’s “happy lab” plan fails to ignite enthusiasm in the diversity reviewers, however, his application will be shelved, no matter how promising his actual scientific research.

The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

It is a sad and dangerous policy for all of us frail mortals. A “doctor” well trained in the recognition of unconscious racism but not necessarily in biochemistry and pathology cannot be relied on to make an accurate diagnosis. As the author says, “The proponents of the systemic racism hypotheses are making a large bet with potentially lethal consequences.”

[The doctrine] that health disparities are necessarily the product of systemic racism has devalued basic science and encumbered medical research with red tape. The fight against cancer has been particularly affected. White and Asian oncologists are assumed to be part of the problem of black cancer mortality, not its solution, absent corrective measures. According to the NIH, leadership of cancer labs should match national or local demographics, whichever has a higher percentage of minorities.

As in all ideologies, logic is dispensed with, and the dogma does not stand up to critical scrutiny:

The AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity sneers at “discredited and racist ideas about biological differences between racial groups”. If race does not exist, as received wisdom now has it, then the racial makeup of clinical trials should not matter.

But it matters more than anything else to the Embedders of Racial Justice and the Advancers of Health Equity.

In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. There were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial, therefore. Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants.

In another case, in which applicants competed for a grant –

… the runner-up possessed a research and leadership record that far surpassed that of the winning candidate. But he lacked the favored demographic characteristics.

Much talent is being lost to medical science because of “anti-racist” bigotry.

[T]he diversity push is discouraging some scientists from competing at all. When the chairmanship of UCLA’s Department of Medicine opened up, some qualified faculty members did not even put their names forward because they did not think that they would be considered …

The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

***

Footnote:

*Heather Mac Donald provides these figures and facts about medical school admissions:

In 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test [MCAT] was in the 71st percentile, meaning that it was equal to or better than 71 percent of all average scores. The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile—a full standard deviation below the average white score. The MCATs have already been redesigned to try to reduce this gap; a quarter of the questions now focus on social issues and psychology.

Yet the gap persists. So medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants. From 2013 to 2016, only 8 percent of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs [grade point averages] and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat … Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs and 31 percent of Hispanic students with those scores were admitted, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situated white college senior to be admitted to medical school and more than nine times as likely to be admitted as a similarly situated Asian senior.

Such disparate rates of admission hold in every combination and range of GPA and MCAT scores. Contrary to the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity, blacks are not being “excluded” from medical training; they are being catapulted ahead of their less valued white and Asian peers.

Posted under corruption, Demography, Health, Leftism, Race, Science by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, September 20, 2022

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Is democracy the best system of government? 95

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” – Winston Churchill

In Britain, the right to vote was eventually extended to everyone except prisoners, Lords, lunatics, and children.

In his Federal Paper No. 10, James Madison distinguishes between a democracy and a republic, describing a democracy as a system of government in which every man has his say along with all the others, while a republic is governed by representatives of the citizens. In our time, a democracy is a representative system.

Can it be easily corrupted? It is in the US that the weakness of the democratic system was most dramatically and catastrophically demonstrated by the Democratic Party when it organized ballot fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The Democrats seem to believe that all votes not cast for them are invalid, and to favor a system which could be summed up as “one Democrat any number of votes”.

So now a party empowered by a minority of the people is imposing its will tyrannically on the entire nation.

Even when the will of a majority prevails, tyranny can emerge.

What checks and balances are there in the US to prevent or stop tyranny? The judicial branch of government? It refused to adjudicate the fraudulent election of 2020.

Do you think democracy is the best system of government?

Are you for universal suffrage? Should every adult have the vote, or should voters be qualified to some extent in some way? What proportion of the voters do you suppose are informed about the candidates and policies they vote for?

Can you suggest improvements to the current system, or describe an entirely different system that would better protect the liberty of the people?

 

Note: These questions are also being discussed on our Forum. Please join us there.

Posted under government by Jillian Becker on Thursday, May 5, 2022

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Invitation 1

These are some of the topics under discussion in our Forum.

Please join us there and add your comments, or post a new topic.

Florida Suing Biden Over Extended COVID Mandate
Kinder Gentler Tyranny
Russia-Ukraine Crisis 2.0: Hunter Biden Linked to Biolabs in Ukraine
FEC Fines DNC and Clinton for Trump Dossier Hoax
Challenging the Deplorable Failure of Public Education
Joe Biden’s Extreme Corruption Still Not Admitted by Corrupt Media
Opening America Even Wider to Disease and Disaster
Europe Erupts Against Lockdowns
Doctor Fauci’s Grift
Ukrainian refugees
Five Global Elections Set to Rock the World in 202
Pakistan – Rapidly Escalating Fuel and Food Crisis
Canadian Politician Arrested and Charged Over Freedom Convoy Involvement
Matt Gaetz Enters Hunter Biden’s Laptop Into the Congressional Record
More Proof that The Democrats Won the 2020 Election by Cheating
Biden Crime Family’s Financial Ties To The CCP Read Into Congressional Record
China’s Solomon Islands Security Deal Raises Red Flags
The Biden Administration’s Inexplicable Appeasement of Iran
CIA Officer Openly Confesses To Rigging 2020 Election For Joe Biden And Says He Would Do It Again
More Clinton Treason
California Will Permit the Killing of Children
Communist China Continuing Buying Up the Western Hemisphere
The Bidens Are Invested in the Mass Production of Death
Biden’s White House Encourages and Rewards Hatred of America
The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming
Donald Trump Sues Hillary Clinton and the DNC Over Russia Hoax
EU ‘Well Prepared’ to Take ‘Massive Inflow’ of Refugees from Ukraine Conflict
No One Can Rule the World
The Continuing Invasion of the Southern Border
The Losses and Gains of Beijing in the Ukraine Crisis/How Did the Chinese See the Russia-Ukraine War

 

 

 

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Friday, April 1, 2022

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Universities Are Deleting The Past To Destroy Our Culture 0

Why did the “woke” academics at the University of Leicester throw away an archive entrusted to their care?

We now know they did. They threw away the archive of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism (IST) – compiled painstakingly over many years and often at personal risk by me and my fellow researchers – as unwanted trash.

My complaint to the university elicited this response from Professor Henrietta O’Connor, the spokesperson charged by the Principal to deal with the complaint: :

The School of Criminology, as with all Schools and departments, prioritises collections in their care which are most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching. A recent search for material relating to the IST proved inconclusive. Any IST material located in future will be appraised by a professionally-qualified archivist and, if appropriate, transferred to the care of our University Archives and Special Collections.

It’s a confession. They keep what is “most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching”.

What is “most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching”? They declare unequivocally, “Ethnicity, sexuality and diversity.”

That is the agenda of the Left to which they are committed. They are “woke”. They have chosen to implement the current Leftist policy known as “cancel culture”. They are erasing records of the past that do not fit with the current – or as they say “contemporary” – political beliefs of the Left.

The IST archive, recording thousands of instances of the savage crime of terrorism – almost all of it by organizations on the Left, with support from the USSR and some from Communist China, through the Cold War years 1968-1990 – was an affront to the ideology of the “woke”.

The search for the archive was not “inconclusive” as the professor claims.  The searcher – the chief archivist of the university – concluded that the archive was lost.

But let’s say some “IST material” may be  “located in future”. Would it be preserved?  Not necessarily. Not probably. Frankly, not a chance.  It would be subject to a process of “prioritising”.  And as it would not be wanted for the teaching of  “ethnicity, gender, and diversity” – and would even pose a threat to such studies – it would not be judged “appropriate”, would not be “prioritised”, and so would be discarded.  

The professor implies, by saying the person who would make the judgment would be “professionally-trained”, that the profession of archivist requires its practitioners to adhere to “woke” ideology as routinely, normally, correctly, as the profession of medicine requires its practitioners to adhere to the ethics of Hippocrates.

Most universities in the Western world now are conscientiously trying to erase history. The IST archive is just one of an incalculable number of records, relics, depictions, monuments that are being destroyed by the very institutions that were founded to preserve our cultural inheritance.

To what end? Is there a  supremely desirable objective that can only be attained by perpetrating this vast relentless destruction?

The answer is to be found in a column by Conrad Black at American Greatness, in which he points out how like George Orwell’s Britain of 1984 America has become in 2022:

Since the Party controlled the present, it also controlled the past.

“One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Streets, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light on the past had been systematically altered.” In other words, “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

“Purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.”

Down came the statues, inscriptions and “anything that might throw light on the past.” As in 1984, America’s founding documents are pure crimethink. Teacher unions now force feed this propaganda in the schools and when parents object, the Department of Justice calls them domestic terrorists.

The past is falsified, statistics are meaningless, and the Party is always right.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only pure power.” As Winston Smith learns:

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

In 2022, embattled Americans are beginning to understand the parallels.

As are the citizens of most of the countries of the late “free West”.

Is it too late to save our culture before it is gone beyond recovery?

 

Jillian Becker      February 1, 2022

Posted under by Jillian Becker on Monday, February 7, 2022

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Universities are deleting the past to destroy our culture 14

Why did the “woke” academics at the University of Leicester throw away an archive entrusted to their care?

We now know they did. They threw away the archive of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism (IST) – compiled painstakingly over many years and often at personal risk by me and my fellow researchers – as unwanted trash.

My complaint to the university elicited this response from Professor Henrietta O’Connor, the spokesperson charged by the Principal to deal with the complaint: :

The School of Criminology, as with all Schools and departments, prioritises collections in their care which are most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching. A recent search for material relating to the IST proved inconclusive. Any IST material located in future will be appraised by a professionally-qualified archivist and, if appropriate, transferred to the care of our University Archives and Special Collections.

It’s a confession. They keep what is “most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching”.

What is “most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching”? They declare unequivocally, “Ethnicity, sexuality and diversity.”

That is the agenda of the Left to which they are committed. They are “woke”. They have chosen to implement the current Leftist policy known as “cancel culture”. They are erasing records of the past that do not fit with the current – or as they say “contemporary” – political beliefs of the Left.

The IST archive, recording thousands of instances of the savage crime of terrorism – almost all of it by organizations on the Left, with support from the USSR and some from Communist China, through the Cold War years 1968-1990 – was an affront to the ideology of the “woke”.

The search for the archive was not “inconclusive” as the professor claims.  The searcher – the chief archivist of the university – concluded that the archive was lost.

But let’s say some “IST material” may be  “located in future”. Would it be preserved?  Not necessarily. Not probably. Frankly, not a chance.  It would be subject to a process of “prioritising”.  And as it would not be wanted for the teaching of  “ethnicity, gender, and diversity” – and would even pose a threat to such studies – it would not be judged “appropriate”, would not be “prioritised”, and so would be discarded.  

The professor implies, by saying the person who would make the judgment would be “professionally-trained”, that the profession of archivist requires its practitioners to adhere to “woke” ideology as routinely, normally, correctly, as the profession of medicine requires its practitioners to adhere to the ethics of Hippocrates.

Most universities in the Western world now are conscientiously trying to erase history. The IST archive is just one of an incalculable number of records, relics, depictions, monuments that are being destroyed by the very institutions that were founded to preserve our cultural inheritance.

To what end? Is there a  supremely desirable objective that can only be attained by perpetrating this vast relentless destruction?

The answer is to be found in a column by Conrad Black at American Greatness, in which he points out how like George Orwell’s Britain of 1984 America has become in 2022:

Since the Party controlled the present, it also controlled the past.

“One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Streets, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light on the past had been systematically altered.” In other words, “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

“Purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.”

Down came the statues, inscriptions and “anything that might throw light on the past.” As in 1984, America’s founding documents are pure crimethink. Teacher unions now force feed this propaganda in the schools and when parents object, the Department of Justice calls them domestic terrorists.

The past is falsified, statistics are meaningless, and the Party is always right.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only pure power.” As Winston Smith learns:

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

In 2022, embattled Americans are beginning to understand the parallels.

As are the citizens of most of the countries of the late “free West”.

Is it too late to save our culture before it is gone beyond recovery?

 

Jillian Becker      February 1, 2022

Posted under Leftism, Totalitarianism, tyranny by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, February 1, 2022

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